Daddy Deployed, Part 1

March 18, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about witnessing a soldier serving in Afghanistan returning home to meet his 9-month old son for the first time.  Observing something this monumental affected me for several days, if not permanently.  In the comments area of that post, a dear reader Sarah mentioned her friend Susan who has 2 sets of twins born 19 months apart (twin boys aged 4 and twin girls aged 2 1/2), a full-time career, and a husband Patric,  a captain in the National Guard, who is serving a year-long tour of duty in Iraq (his second, mind you).

Her story stopped me dead in my tracks.  How is that even possible?

I asked Susan to share with us how everything is going for her and her family.  Happily, she agreed to let us peek into her life.

Q. Tell us about your day…

“We have a remarkable system for the mornings right now.  I was lamenting the other day that I haven’t started insisting that the boys get dressed by themselves, but I try to remind myself that in our current cycle of normal, we are in survival mode.  I will start that morning battle when their dad is here to fight it with me.

I get up at 5:00 so that I can shower and drink a cup of coffee alone.  The children usually start coming down between 6 and 6:30.  However, one of my girls is currently out of bed at 5:00 in the morning.  If I had one, I could insist that she go back to bed.  But this one will start crying, and she starts the other girl crying, and then the boys are up and well, 4 up at 5 is so much worse than 1 up at 5.  So Elaine does her make-up with me in the morning and she may or may not go to daycare with eye shadow that day.

Before I go to bed the night before, I lay out their clothes.  I make sure that there are four pair of shoes out as well.  It is strangely important that there are just 4 pair of shoes.  Anything less is obvious because I don’t want to dig for shoes in the morning; but, if there are say 5 or 6 pair of shoes it is a problem too.  A girl that sees a choice of shoes laying out could create a domino effect that could make us loose half an hour as I fight through who wears what shoes and tie and re-tie shoes.  I don’t care what shoes they wear, but I pay attention when I come home with info sheets from the daycare that say they can’t wear open-toe shoes.  The princess shoes and the sandals are automatically out the window, but those are the first shoes the girls go for if they see them in the morning.

In the morning I lay out toothbrushes, vitamins, sippy cups, and start cartoons, etc in that hour that I shower and brush my teeth and drink my coffee.  It is a total conveyor belt.  I dress, brush teeth, shove vitamins, slap on shoes, and move on to the next one.  That process takes a solid half and hour.  We’re usually out the door shortly after 7 a.m. so that I can drop the kids and then commute in and be to work by 8 myself.

My husband and I are very lucky people to have the jobs that we do.  I work at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, and my husband works for the Tennessee Army National Guard.  We both feel that we get to participate daily in something that is bigger than ourselves, and that makes our current separation somehow more acceptable to us. Every day I get to go to a place that conducts itself in a first class manner in every endeavor.  I am a project manager in the Hematology Department at St. Jude.  I spend my days doing a wide range of things from protocol writing to meeting planning to working with the FDA.   I never know exactly what I’ll be focused on any given day, and it is a nice change from the rigid routine that we keep at home.

How do I spend lunch?  I hit the café the moment I make it to work and generally don’t stop eating until I leave at the end of the day.  I feel like I’m constantly eating, but then when I get home in the evening, I rarely get a chance to sit down and eat anything.

We have a great cafeteria oddly enough, so I can drop in there for a wide variety of food depending on my day most days.  More often than I should, I take it back to my desk and eat it there.  When Patric first left, a girlfriend of mine asked what she could do.  She doesn’t have kids and knows all of the great restaurants down town.  I suggested that she schedule a lunch, choose the place and tell me where to be once-in-awhile, and that has been a great help to me.  Lunch is one of the few times that I can take a break without a huge amount of pre-planning, so it’s nice to just have a destination and a friend sitting there every once-in-awhile.  It’s such a small thing, but I’m so unlikely to be the one to take five minutes to schedule it when I could be getting five other things done.

Q. Evenings?

Evenings in our house are as routinized but never quite as smooth as the mornings in their actual carrying-out.  I’m usually back to pick the kids up around 5:00 or a little after.  We invariably have a break down of some sort.  It is weird to watch it happen every night.  It’s like the poor little things have held it together according to the rules all day long and when they see me, they suddenly can’t put their jackets on, walk without falling over, not whine.  It is amazing, by the time we’re out the door people are just staring at us and I’m sure several people have wondered why we’re such a hot mess that time of day.  No idea.

I used to be pretty crazy about wanting the kids to eat correctly balanced, mostly from scratch meals that covered a wide range of foods.  It seems important to me that they learn to love food or at least accept that there are many foods that can be appreciated.  At this particular moment I need the children to eat.  We eat a lot of mac-n-cheese and corndogs.

Q. How do you unwind?

Honestly, I don’t.  I just don’t right now. I have a full DVR, my current Netflix have been on the mantel for months.  I would love to have more time to bake because I love everything about it, but the quiet time you need just isn’t there just now.  Like most busy moms I have every intention of getting back to the things I love someday, just not right now.  It just doesn’t fit.

Q. Do you have any helpers that provide support, a break, etc?

I have wonderful friends.  Simply wonderful.  They show up.  They baby sit.  They come with projects for the kids.  They come and entertain me sometimes too.  The grandmas in our church have organized themselves to come over every Saturday and watch the kids for an hour so I can run to the grocery store.  Others send packages to Patric.  I am truly in debt to so many friends that have just shown up.

Q. What type of support does the army provide?

The Army has a Family Readiness Group program, which makes an effort to work at the local level with the specific families of differently deployed groups to disseminate information.  The USO is a great help. In our situation, the National Guard is a bit removed from the daily family life of its soldiers.  And Patric’s home unit is actually across the state from us, so we’ve not been able to take advantage of these services as much as we would like to.

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Tomorrow, we’ll continue our conversation with Susan.  See Daddy Deployed, Part 2.  Home Tour Friday will resume on Saturday this week.

Aren’t you amazed with the resilience of this woman?  Susan also writes an incredible blog, The Mighty Stuber Brood, which chronicles the story of her family.  Take a look, and just see if you don’t need to come back every day for updates.

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Category: For Moms